An attempt to turn rally into a form of meditation that happens to also be a game—and with beautiful results. Rally is a motorsport and, as such, is made of very physical elements— fragile humans in hard helmets and full body protective gear get crammed inside small cars with large loud engines and grippy tires. And they carve paths over a variety of rugged terrain in all manner of weather conditions as fast as they can manage. And, hopefully, faster than all the other teams. Rally is a form of competition between human beings (which we take part in via machines we control). But the more fundamental conflict at the heart of rally is a struggle against the physical terrain itself: tires fighting against a brute geometry made of tarmac and gravel, dirt and mud, snow and ice.
The art of rally manages to distill this fundamental conflict of physical forces into a quiet yet intensely focused digital experience. The digital distillation is composed of almost abstract shapes, brilliant colors and simulated outdoor lighting, iceberg deep virtual physics, and patterns of controller inputs. And the game we are left with feels utterly incredible. The handling model and the way it changes with the terrain is something like a wonder of gamefeel.
The core offering is a career mode where the player competes in a sequence of tournaments organized chronologically through different years. The courses have their charm and are visually reminiscent of prototypical landscapes associated with a particular country. A minimalistic (and occasional whimsical) history of “the golden age” of rally is told as the player works their way through the years. This is not so detailed—and I at least would find it less interesting if it was— but it provides the right flavor. The career mode can be plenty challenging for newcomers and gets increasingly demanding as you move through the tournaments and unlock more powerful vehicles. Free roam locales present a way to get the feel for a vehicle, an area, and some tricky obstacles in a very low stakes environment. The time trial modes, online leaderboards, and daily challenges offer the pursuit of endless perfection for the aspirational player. At the end of the day though, the game is a set of courses and a collection of vehicles. And that’s a good thing. It’s a set of stunning tracks each of which offers a unique challenge and is essentially an opportunity to enter a state of flow as you attend to the carefully crafted virtual sensations. Which virtual sensations you experience depends on the track itself, the weather conditions, and which vehicle you choose. The feel resonates outward from the controller and is continuously created through the simple but demanding task of guiding your car through the track. It is something like an art. And a very demanding one. And one you can get utterly lost in for vast stretches of time as the excellent soundtrack fills the air. And, unlike the art of archery, the art of rally can be practiced in the comfort of your living room.
It feels like racing games have sometimes fallen out of the general conversation surrounding the medium of videogames (if they were ever a part of such conversation in the first place.). The idea behind the genre is simple, intuitive, familiar. Travel from point A to point B. Drive from here to there—as fast as you can. Maybe it all seems too simple to be worthy of discussion. But the devil’s in the details as they say—and, when you get the details right, all the magic is too. That’s what we can witness in the art of rally— the developer has nailed something small, something focused, but done it so well that it stands above many games with much loftier ambitions. And it might take something like the art of rally to get the less automotively enthused to see that this genre and the experience it can provide is very much worth talking about—something stripped down to the essentials, the sheer mechanics, something torn out of the usual commercial context and freed from pricey brand names and energy drink logos.
Just how exactly you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is what makes these things special. And that can be hard to even see and harder still to describe—how it works, why it’s interesting, how exactly it stands out from others in the same genre. It takes time and experience to recognize the elegance of the systems, the interesting challenges the courses present, and the opportunity for mastery that they provide. Spend a few hours internalizing the art of rally’s controls and the basic handling and you start to get a glimpse of just how incredible this is. But there’s a sense that this is just the beginning.
Games like this can be enjoyed by anyone, but maybe can only be fully appreciated by the players who become true masters of this art. We might be able to approximate this sort of insight if we could just pretend this was the one cartridge we had all summer long. If I ever reach that higher plane of understanding, I may have much more to say or there will be nothing left to say at all.
The art of rally manages to distill this fundamental conflict of physical forces into a quiet yet intensely focused digital experience. The digital distillation is composed of almost abstract shapes, brilliant colors and simulated outdoor lighting, iceberg deep virtual physics, and patterns of controller inputs. And the game we are left with feels utterly incredible. The handling model and the way it changes with the terrain is something like a wonder of gamefeel.
The core offering is a career mode where the player competes in a sequence of tournaments organized chronologically through different years. The courses have their charm and are visually reminiscent of prototypical landscapes associated with a particular country. A minimalistic (and occasional whimsical) history of “the golden age” of rally is told as the player works their way through the years. This is not so detailed—and I at least would find it less interesting if it was— but it provides the right flavor. The career mode can be plenty challenging for newcomers and gets increasingly demanding as you move through the tournaments and unlock more powerful vehicles. Free roam locales present a way to get the feel for a vehicle, an area, and some tricky obstacles in a very low stakes environment. The time trial modes, online leaderboards, and daily challenges offer the pursuit of endless perfection for the aspirational player. At the end of the day though, the game is a set of courses and a collection of vehicles. And that’s a good thing. It’s a set of stunning tracks each of which offers a unique challenge and is essentially an opportunity to enter a state of flow as you attend to the carefully crafted virtual sensations. Which virtual sensations you experience depends on the track itself, the weather conditions, and which vehicle you choose. The feel resonates outward from the controller and is continuously created through the simple but demanding task of guiding your car through the track. It is something like an art. And a very demanding one. And one you can get utterly lost in for vast stretches of time as the excellent soundtrack fills the air. And, unlike the art of archery, the art of rally can be practiced in the comfort of your living room.
It feels like racing games have sometimes fallen out of the general conversation surrounding the medium of videogames (if they were ever a part of such conversation in the first place.). The idea behind the genre is simple, intuitive, familiar. Travel from point A to point B. Drive from here to there—as fast as you can. Maybe it all seems too simple to be worthy of discussion. But the devil’s in the details as they say—and, when you get the details right, all the magic is too. That’s what we can witness in the art of rally— the developer has nailed something small, something focused, but done it so well that it stands above many games with much loftier ambitions. And it might take something like the art of rally to get the less automotively enthused to see that this genre and the experience it can provide is very much worth talking about—something stripped down to the essentials, the sheer mechanics, something torn out of the usual commercial context and freed from pricey brand names and energy drink logos.
Just how exactly you get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is what makes these things special. And that can be hard to even see and harder still to describe—how it works, why it’s interesting, how exactly it stands out from others in the same genre. It takes time and experience to recognize the elegance of the systems, the interesting challenges the courses present, and the opportunity for mastery that they provide. Spend a few hours internalizing the art of rally’s controls and the basic handling and you start to get a glimpse of just how incredible this is. But there’s a sense that this is just the beginning.
Games like this can be enjoyed by anyone, but maybe can only be fully appreciated by the players who become true masters of this art. We might be able to approximate this sort of insight if we could just pretend this was the one cartridge we had all summer long. If I ever reach that higher plane of understanding, I may have much more to say or there will be nothing left to say at all.